


Perception Filters

by cerebel



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: BDSM, F/M, Non-Sexual Submission, Sexual Non-Sexual Submission???, Speculation of non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-13 16:50:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerebel/pseuds/cerebel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha Romanov isn't in love with Clint Barton. But she knows what he needs.</p><p>Or, at least, she used to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perception Filters

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on tumblr at [cerebel](http://cerebel.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Woke up with this fic fully-formed in my head, took about an hour to get it down. All mistakes are my own.

Natasha Romanov isn’t in love with Clint Barton. But she knows what he needs. 

Or, at least, she used to. 

It started slow, when she was a green recruit, a turncoat, a weapon in SHIELD’s eyes. Just after a mission, he would be different. He would push her into staying with him, show her bad movies, order in bad food. This isn’t to say that she didn’t enjoy it; Clint was, is, and will always be the only one who can melt the frozen pieces of her, who can slip little shards of her soul back where they belong. But in those times, she could sense that he was tense as that drawn-back bowstring of his, like he has a shot to take but nowhere safe to aim. 

What she does for him _really_ began when she realized he would do what she said. When she realized that a part of him wished hopelessly to subsume itself in the words of another. Clint wants to give himself away, loyalty and all, but he has no one he trusts to give himself to. 

When Natasha realizes this, she also realizes how dangerous it is. She doesn’t think that Clint would ever betray SHIELD. But there’s more to it than that.

“Lie down,” she says, once. “On your stomach.” He gives her an odd look but obeys, and she straddles his ass and digs her thumbs into his spine. He has peculiar knots of tension, as an archer, and she knows them all. 

“Will you do everything I say?” she asks. “Promise me, Clint.” 

Easy enough, at first. Natasha is a torturer, and a good one, but with Clint she doesn’t even have to go that far. She can push him to the limit without laying a hand on him. Starts with easy things, like having him get into the starting position for a push-up and stay there, just stay, as long as he can. Rests her feet on him and watches one of those bad movies, and she can feel the strain in his body, monitor it through the point where they touch. She feels when he starts to shake, and she feels when his strength, or so he thinks, is about to desert him. 

“Five more minutes,” she’d say. Two minutes later: “Four more. Doing good, Clint.” And she’d stretch out the remaining until he collapsed, panting. 

“You did good,” she’d tell him. Let him kneel next to her, and rest his head against her thigh as the movie plays out. Stroke his hair. And she could sense that something in him had changed, that there was a switch she’d managed to flip -- or at least a dial that she’d managed to turn down. 

Takes her a while to really diagnose the inside of Clint’s head, and that’s because she’s too personally involved. If she had the benefit of distance, it wouldn’t be a problem. But instead, she has to distill each piece of evidence through the filters of her own perception. But, eventually, she does figure it out. 

Clint doesn’t have room for all the atrocities they see, in his head. They overwhelm him with cruelty, and he overwhelms himself with ... helplessness. He wants to make more of a difference. 

She’s surprised when she realizes this. She’d thought -- the two of them, they commit atrocities themselves. But, to Clint’s mind, they don’t _count_ , in some twisted way of reckoning. Because he kills in service of obedience, because he does it out of _trust_ that he’s making the world better, he can handle it. 

Natasha has infinite room for atrocities. She could stack blood-filled memories in her mind for the rest of her life and still have space. But Clint, Clint has to take the memories and sap away the power of them, turn them delicate shades of sepia before he files them away. And she can help him do that. 

She goes further and further with him, a master feeling out the extent of her power. He lets himself be vulnerable before her. It’s not easy for him, she can see that; he watches her, he won’t let her bind him or put him in any position he can’t get out of. 

“Nat,” he says, once, “why are you doing this?” 

She shrugs. Runs her fingers through his hair. “You need it.” A half-answer, avoiding the most important question of all. 

Does _she_ need it? 

His trust is a shaky, thin thing at first, but it grows more solid every time. 

So: she pushes him to his limits, and then brings him down with softer things, backrubs, massages, petting him like a hunting dog. 

She adds a blindfold. The difference is palpable; he gives himself to her more easily than he ever has. So there’s an element of detaching him from the world, too. There’s an element of turning off his mind. 

Natasha takes that to heart, and next time, adds a gag. He’s flinched away every time she’s tried to tie his hands, but still, she reaches for them, winds a tie around his wrists. Blue silk; she took it, once, from the neck of a Thai businessman, before breaking his arm and leaving him for his wife to find. 

There’s nothing beautiful or elegant about Clint this way. Still, she is drawn to him. She skims a hand over his shoulders, feeling the leashed power of his body. Incredible.

She starts having him strip down. She says it’s because she can better see his musculature, that she can better know when he’s pushed to his limit, but it’s not quite that. There’s something in her that wants to see him vulnerable as possible, to see all of his power bound up and made hers. It’s at this time when she realizes something she should have known a long time ago. 

“You’re hard,” she says. Her voice is somewhat stern, confrontational. It’s because she’s surprised. Yes, there’s some element of a turn-on in this for her, but she hadn’t realized...

“It’s just a physical thing. A reaction.” No gag this time, just a blindfold, with his hands bound behind his back. 

She crouches in front of him, and presses her palm against the curve of his length in his briefs. He shudders, like a racehorse, and she knows she has crossed a line. She’d best make sure, in this session, that this line is something they can afford to lose between them. 

She pulls back, sits on the couch. 

“Do you want to get off?” she asks.

“Nat...” 

“Answer the question.” 

A beat. “I guess.” He’s tentative, scared, and she can see his hands twitching. If he wasn’t tied up, he’d already have removed the blindfold. She’s glad she bound him, then. This can’t become real for him. He’ll drift out of her realm, and she won’t be able to help anymore. 

“You can against me,” she says. “I might untie you when you do.” 

She guides him close, presses the line of her shin against him. “Go ahead.” Her voice is calm. 

He is hesitant at first. She anticipates it being kind of lewd, a little bit ridiculous, but instead she can’t take her eyes off of him. A lifetime of seducing men for her own purposes -- and a few women too -- and this feels completely different. It’s what she’s seen in him this whole time taken to a new level. He doesn’t desire her, she knows that, but this is his body craving a loss of control on a level he can’t control. 

He leans his forehead into her thigh, thrusts against her, and these sounds spill from his lips, these shuddery and helpless sounds. And Natasha is so caught up in Clint that his orgasm feels like a release for her too. Wet spot spreading on his briefs, and she strokes his neck, damp with sweat. 

It goes further every time. Falls into a routine, eventually. She doesn’t touch him much; she’ll have him strip down completely, tie his hands, slide the gag between his teeth (she knows, from experience now, that he’ll feel freer when his tongue is bound) and blindfold him. And then she’ll lube up a little toy and slide it inside him. He always makes a sound like he’s been punched -- and she’ll take the remote for the toy and flip it to the first setting. Barely perceptible whine as it vibrates inside him, but he’ll look as though he just touched a live wire, his muscles going visible against his skin for a tense half-second. 

She doesn’t do much more than that. A few minutes in, she’ll dial it up again. He’s hard, leaking, fighting against the bonds. (She’s had to find something more solid than the tie.) His hips jerk into midair, and his breath shudders in his throat. 

Eventually, she dials it to the highest setting. She steps up to him, letting her hand trail over his shoulders, and crouches in front of him. 

“Can you come for me?” she asks. And most of the time, that’s it. He convulses, collapses in on himself, shoots come onto his chest, his belly. Sometimes she wipes it off, sometimes she gathers it up on her fingers and has him lick her clean. Sometimes she leaves him tied up, sometimes she undoes it all and helps him to the couch, and lets him lean against her as exhaustion takes him. 

It’s not sexual. Not for her -- it obviously is for him. Sometimes she’ll leave turned on, but it never takes much effort to slip that into a corner of her mind. Feels wrong masturbating to the thought of him, so she gives up on that pretty quickly. 

And she’s not in love with him. She doesn’t worship the ground he walks on; the sound of his voice doesn’t send shivers through her. What she wants is what she gets. 

It works for them. Here, she is powerful; here, he is not. Neither condition is indicative of reality. 

~*~

After they demolish the Chitauri, Natasha and Clint leave together. They go north, find a little town in Maine.

Clint gets them two different rooms. 

She knocks on his the first night, surprised that he hasn’t come to find her already. He’s usually the one who asks. He opens it partway, and says: “Not tonight.” 

In retrospect, maybe she shouldn’t have accepted that. But she does, and she goes back to her room, and she wonders. Would be a lie to say she hadn’t considered it, wondered what went on with him and Loki. If Clint told Loki so much about her, did he go all the way? Did he say _everything_? 

And Loki, the bastard, had he taken advantage of that? He would have taken delight in subverting the bond Clint had with Natasha, turning it into an expression of his own power. He might have done to Clint what Natasha did to him, but for all the wrong reasons, and with all the wrong results. 

In the morning, she goes swimming, and when she’s done, he’s out on the beach, sunglasses hiding the microexpressions around his eyes. 

“Is it over?” she asks, while the surf rushes around her ankles.

“It just brings up bad memories, now.” His eyes are out on the horizon. She resists the urge to follow his glance. 

“I love you,” she tries, but the words feel wrong on her tongue, even before she’s finished saying them. 

He shakes his head, and he steps further into the surf.


End file.
